A generalization of Lempel-Ziv complexity and its application to the comparison of protein sequences

• DOI: 10.1007/s10910-010-9673-7
• Publication Date: 2010-03-29T11:04:42Z
• Authors: Chun Li; Zhengxing Li; Xiaoqi Zheng; Hong Ma; Xiaoqing Yu
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 03 medical and health sciences

In this paper, a complexity measure of symbolic sequences is proposed that generalizes the Lempel-Ziv complexity by taking into account a specific kind of the inexact copy in the text, and based on which, a new sequence distance measure for the similarity analysis is introduced. The utility of our approach is illustrated by an examination of the relationships among β-globin proteins of 13 species.